Qiurui He
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How to train neural networks for flare removal
Yicheng Wu
Tianfan Xue
Jiawen Chen
Ashok Veeraraghavan
ICCV (2021)
Preview abstract
When a camera is pointed at a strong light source, the resulting photograph may contain lens flare artifacts. Flares appear in a wide variety of patterns (halos, streaks, color bleeding, haze, etc.) and this diversity in appearance makes flare removal challenging. Existing analytical solutions make strong assumptions about the artifact’s geometry or brightness, and therefore only work well on a small subset of flares. Machine learning techniques have shown success in removing other types of artifacts, like reflections, but have not been widely applied to flare removal due to the lack of training data. To solve this problem, we explicitly model the optical causes of flare either empirically or using wave optics, and generate semi-synthetic pairs of flare-corrupted and clean images. This enables us to train neural networks to remove lens flare for the first time. Experiments show our data synthesis approach is critical for accurate flare removal, and that models trained with our technique generalize well to real lens flares across different scenes, lighting conditions, and cameras.
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Learning to Autofocus
Charles Herrmann
Richard Strong Bowen
Neal Wadhwa
Ramin Zabih
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (2020)
Preview abstract
Autofocus is an important task for digital cameras, yet current approaches often exhibit poor performance. We propose a learning-based approach to this problem, and provide a realistic dataset of sufficient size for effective learning. Our dataset is labeled with per-pixel depths obtained from multi-view stereo, following [9]. Using this dataset, we apply modern deep classification models and an ordinal regression loss to obtain an efficient learning-based autofocus technique. We demonstrate that our approach provides a significant improvement compared with previous learned and non-learned methods: our model reduces the mean absolute error by a factor of 3.6 over the best comparable baseline algorithm. Our dataset and code are publicly available.
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Handheld Mobile Photography in Very Low Light
Kiran Murthy
Yun-Ta Tsai
Tim Brooks
Tianfan Xue
Nikhil Karnad
Dillon Sharlet
Ryan Geiss
Marc Levoy
ACM Transactions on Graphics, vol. 38 (2019), pp. 16
Preview abstract
Taking photographs in low light using a mobile phone is challenging and rarely produces pleasing results. Aside from the physical limits imposed by read noise and photon shot noise, these cameras are typically handheld, have small apertures and sensors, use mass-produced analog electronics that cannot easily be cooled, and are commonly used to photograph subjects that move, like children and pets. In this paper we describe a system for capturing clean, sharp, colorful photographs in light as low as 0.3 lux, where human vision becomes monochromatic and indistinct. To permit handheld photography without flash illumination, we capture, align, and combine multiple frames. Our system employs “motion metering”, which uses an estimate of motion magnitudes (whether due to handshake or moving objects) to identify the number of frames and the per-frame exposure times that together minimize both noise and motion blur in a captured burst. We combine these frames using robust alignment and merging techniques that are specialized for high-noise imagery. To ensure accurate colors in such low light, we employ a learning-based auto white balancing algorithm. To prevent the photographs from looking like they were shot in daylight, we use tone mapping techniques inspired by illusionistic painting: increasing contrast, crushing shadows to black, and surrounding the scene with darkness. All of these processes are performed using the limited computational resources of a mobile device. Our system can be used by novice photographers to produce shareable pictures in a few seconds based on a single shutter press, even in environments so dim that humans cannot see clearly.
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